June Updates from San Francisco Chapter

Our Pride events were very successful- we helped TGIJP table at TransMarch, then on Sunday we concurrently ran our monthly letterwriting event and a booth at the SF Pride Festival.

At the festival, we handed out lots of schwag, met lots of interested folks, got some of them signed up for the local and national mailing lists, and shared info on Black&Pink as well as TGIJP. We also got a handful of folks to participate in social media campaigns to raise awareness about @ellabakercenter’s push to #PassSB124 (ending youth solitary) and the #noSFjail and #NoNewJails campaigns. We were disheartened to see Israel there with a giant booth, in addition to lots of corporate monsters, and a few of us discussed foregoing tabling next year in order to hand out materials on pinkwashing.

Our letterwriting table, held at wicked grounds cafe, went really well. The cafe was packed for pride and we had a table right by the front door. We passed out a lot of B&P swag including our “faces you won’t see at pride” posters. A number of people made one-off “happy pride cards” & we got several new people signed up for our local lists.

In July, we have our monthly letterwriting night planned in Oakland at RPSC on Wed, July 29 6:30-8:30.

In August, we’ll have our monthly letterwriting in SF again.

We’re also continuing to plan our inside/outside study group. Currently, we’re doing final coordination and confirmation with our incarcerated participants, drafting the outreach emails and registration form for free world participants and gathering the potential reading list. We’ve decided to transcribe the meetings do that we can send full accounts of the meetings back to incarcerated members rather than just notes (as well as sending each of them everyone else’s reflection letters about each set of readings).

Some other news & updates not directly from FOW but from our community

Critical Resistance & the No New Jail Coalition just released a new report, The People’s Report

Queer/Trans Latino/a culture under attack in SF – Monday night Galleria De La Raza had their pride mural, Por Vida, set on fire (the 3rd time this mural has been defaced) and staff / artists have received threats that next time it will be bullets. There is a community rally tonight, Wednesday July 1st & the gallery is accepting donations to help replace the mural. Any and all support is welcome.